As I listened to ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County’ on Monday I realized there are many ways one can enjoy, or perhaps more accurately “enjoy,” these grand dames of reality television.

There’s a scene at Housewife Shannon Beador’s house where housewives Kelly Dodd and Tamra greet each other as they do: with Tamra saying, “I’m wearing my Kelly shirt!’ and Kelly replying, “Oh, yeah, motorboating!” and then burying her face in Tamra’s décolletage while blowing raspberries with her lips.

Typically tacky, right? But now replay that scene as it would be if it was narrated by Sir David Attenborough on some BBC nature series: “One female now approaches another and greets her in a manner unique to the species Realus Housesapiens … .”

From trash to class! You’re welcome.

This will be a breezier recap than most because if you noticed at the top my mention of “listened” and thought, Doesn’t the male Recapus Televisionus watch and not listen, well, normally you’d be as correct as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, i.e., 100 percent.

But Monday was a very busy day, which included a work trip to Los Angeles, a trek I can make in less than a day but Matt, the soon-to-be-ex of Housewife Gina Kirschenheiter, can only muster the energy and provisions to make every few weeks.

And since it was also my 24th wedding anniversary on Monday and I was pretty much another 100 percent sure that my Actual wife’s interests did not include watching the Housewives and then watching me write this folderol, I decided to listen to the screener in the car on the drive home.

Which taught me this: As an audiobook, “The Real Housewives of Orange County” is even worse than it as a TV show, as dull yet trashy as Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” crossed with Judith Krantz’s “Dazzle.”

This episode wasn’t much more exciting than the previous one though there was a more respectable amount of booze downed, though alas, not in my Housewife-mobile.

Gina continued to talk about how carefree her impending divorce with Matt will be though her frequent tears belie that just a bit.

Housewife Emily Simpson continued her efforts to persuade husband Shane to have a fourth baby, as easy as popping one of their nine frozen embyros into a surrogate mother, though Emily’s sister is apparently calling it quits after carrying Emily’s twin boys and daughter. “She said, ‘Oven is closed,’” Emily’s mother-in-law tells her fertility doctor.

And both Gina and Emily just can’t stop talking about why Shannon isn’t friendlier to them faster, a point that’s underscored when Shannon throws herself a dinner party after returning from her successful QVC sales tryout.

Tamra tells husband Eddie Judge that she’s headed to Shannon’s for “a celebratory dinner,” though Eddie’s ears do not deceive him and he hears what we all hear, which is that Tamra thinks celebratory is pronounced “celibate-ory.”

“She’s going celibate?” he asks Tamra.

“No, she was celibate when she was married,” Tamra cracks.

“Actually she didn’t sell-a-bit, she sold-a-lot,” she continues, referencing how much of Shannon’s frozen food she sold on QVC, and once again that just as a ’70s heavy metal anthem is better with more cowbell, an episode of the Housewives is always improved with more Tamra.

When the dinner gets started Kelly shoves her face in Tamra’s chest, Gina gets all weepy over Matt, Vicki Gunvalson muses over whether Gina is suffering from “divorce remorse.” By the time I heard Shannon wonder, “Is it done? Is it overdone?” I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about her main dish or Gina’s marriage. Could have been both, though one was served with a lot more ginger than the other.

Because this was the podcasting equivalent of reality TV I didn’t track all the tears and beers and unseemly jeers. I do know that no one fell down, and I’m still not happy about that.

But next week should be better, as the Housewives head for a Jamaican get-away. Kelly says she recently binge-bought 27 swimsuits, Shannon says she doesn’t want to wear one once, and judging from the trailer for next week we’re in for middle-aged white women wearing Rastafarian tri-colored beanies and trying out bad patois.

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.